The present invention relates to an implantable cardioverter/defibrillator and more specifically to a method for discriminating atrial rhythms from ventricular rhythms.
In the field of cardiac monitoring and treatment systems, it is often necessary to distinguish the electrical activity in the atria from the electrical activity in the ventricles of the heart. One way to make this distinction is to provide widely separated ventricular leads so that the sources of the electrical signals taken from the heart are not detected by the same lead configuration. A critical disadvantage of this method is that in order to place the sensing leads in the appropriate positions, an invasive thoracotomy procedure is required.
Another method to discriminate sensed atrial electrical activity from sensed ventricular activity is through the use of cross-correlation and transfer function analysis of multiple single lead systems. However, this type of solution requires intensive and complex signal processing.